the subtitle comes from a letter Samuel Melville wrote from prison. He was one of the co-conspirators of the 1969 Attica Uprisings. i wonder what is possible, what can be mended when i am deliberate with my words, with my time, with my attention. what inevitable direction might emerge? i encountered the letter during a class on abolition i took last summer, in which they also shared the following poem:
the poem is by Joseph Jarman (musician, revolutionary, poetry), from the collection Black Case Volume I & II. this an EXCUSE ME? poem. i was astounded.
in the introduction to this collection, Jarman writes: “Exile is a state of mind that people get into in order to escape from the reality of themselves in the world of the now - is it a safe place inside the mind full of mostly lies and false visions that allow the being to think that it is free of the responsibility of living in a world with all other living things.”
i think whiteness is this kind of exile, this kind of estrangement and oblivion. Jarman goes on to say “if you are “in Exile” this book as small as it is - is to say to everyone, without exception, that you are loved and can indeed RETURN.”
exile is not irrefutable, it waits to be disrupted just like anything else. to be deliberate in speech, in language, has the power to shift this dis-ease. June Jordan writes:
so what if i told you the truth, what if i focused on the first and last purpose of every encounter, what then. could we interrupt each other’s experience of exile and loneliness.
say return, say how did you get all the way over there? say what are you hiding from. say i noticed you had gone and i wondered where you went. say welcome back, i missed you.
June Jordan, Poetry for the People, 1995 ↩